Maybe You’re the Problem, Not Them

It’s hard for people to break the habit of being themselves, make a change, and level up into a new identity. And it’s even harder when you view and hold them to the identity they’re trying to break out of.

In this episode, we’ll be reviewing: 

• How you may be getting in the way of someone’s personal development, and subconsciously discouraging their growth (we all do this!). 
• A concept called Mind Maps, which will give us insight to the power of our beliefs and why we pigeonhole people to the identity they’re trying to break out of. 
•  5 steps that will help you break out of the habit of boxing someone, and into the habit of empowerment — empower someone to become better and step into a new identity. 

If information isn’t enough to drive you to action and empowerment, and you require extra support in managing your voice judgement and your inner critic, you’re invited to join a Stanford University Master's Degree Mindset Group Coaching program, which launches on 9/13/21, 

This program has been a training for about 41 years, and is a proven, state-of-the-art methodology which has revolutionized the art of success. 

Whether you’re in the middle of a job transition, a life transition, or simply stuck in one area of your life, this course is filled with practical tools and powerful techniques that will ignite self discovery, awaken personal insight, and empower you to step fully into the life you desire. 

In this course, you’ll have the opportunity to learn how to: 

• Create a new relationship with time...one that eliminates stress
• Silence your inner critic and get out of your own way
• Increase your self-discovery  and cultivate your intuition so you can trust yourself more
• Develop powerful listening and communication skills so that you can become more connected and relatable
• And so much more!

This is a pilot course being offered at a highly discounted rate (for one time only). Regular investment for this course is $995, but the pilot will be offered for the low price of $200!

Spots are limited and are already starting to fill…

If you’re interested in the program, or you know someone that may benefit, go to www.empowerhousecoaching.co/pilot and RSVP, before it’s too late. September 10th will be the deadline to save your seat.

If you’re feeling generous, give the gift of sharing information and transforming someone’s life by sharing this podcast or the link to the pilot with anyone you know which may benefit from the program. 

Transcript

Unknown 0:12
Welcome to Empowerhouse life coaching, the podcast. My name is Amanda Escobedo, I'm a life coach pro, conscious design expert, master of removing mental blockers and upgrading your thoughts, I'm the founder of empowerhouse life coaching, and I'm your host. Welcome to episode nine.  Per usual, I've got a burning question for you. And my burning question is, do you box people? Do you box your friends, do you box your family, your employees, your significant other? And what do I mean by boxing people? Well, let's say you have a friend, which you identified as a partier of your of the group, and your friend who loves to party says, I think I'm going to try and start drinking less. How do you respond? do you chuckle and say, sure, I've heard that one before? Or do you say, that's awesome, let me know how I can support you. Here's another example. Let's say you have a significant other, which you've identified as selfish, and your significant other agrees to work on that. How do you respond? Do you say, I'll believe it when I see it. O do you say, great, please let me know what you need for me to be successful. And what about the workplace. Let's say you have an employee, which is underperforming and your employee agrees to apply the changes you've requested to help improve their performance. How do you assess their progress? Do you search for evidence which reinforces they can't do the job? Or do you focus on behaviors and actions which demonstrate their improvement? Now, if you haven't gathered, to box someone is to hold someone to an identity that you've created for them. It's to search for evidence which reinforces your beliefs about that identity. It's to interpret information, or your experiences in a way which reinforces your beliefs. And it's to easily dismiss evidence, which doesn't align with your beliefs, and the identity that you've created for that person. To box someone is to discourage someone's growth and slow down their personal development, and in a business setting, boxing employees has a negative impact on the company's ROI. When leaders box their employees, turnover increases, which increases costs, decreases company morale, and decreases productivity. And in my 10 plus years of working in HR, I've definitely experienced my fair share of leaders and executives boxing their employees. For example, leaders would come to me ready and hopeful to fire their employees within a week or even 24 hours. I would of course slow down the process, gather information, seek to understand the big picture. And part of my process was to ask a bajillion questions? Has this person been trained? Have you ever seen the person meet expectations? Are these performance issues new behaviors or have they been a pattern and for how long? Have expectations of the roles or deliverables ever been reviewed? Has the employee been informed that he or she is not meeting expectations and the specifics of what that means? Most of the time, the leaders had never had a conversation with their employee, because they didn't have the time.

Unknown 3:40
And according to the leader, it was just easier for them to push through and do the work themselves, which means the employee had no clue they were underperforming, all while the leader was building resentment toward the employee and sitting in their own frustration because the leader was just taking on the burden of the extra work. Now in a situation like this, I, as the HR partner, would partner closely with the leader to develop a performance improvement plan. We'd create a communication strategy and documentation to support the conversation, and I'd coach and guide the leader in improving their employee's performance. But through that process, I started to recognize a problem fairly quickly. And the problem was the leader didn't hold the belief that the employee was capable of improving and doing the job, the leader had boxed the employee. And when the leader boxed the employee, the process we built out to improve the employee's performance never worked. Without believing an employee's abilities, the employee never has a chance to succeed. Rather, transitioning out of their role or out of the organization becomes inevitable. Now, I saw this time and time again with new leaders, all the way up to C suite executives. And I recently had an in depth discussion about this topic with my best friend who's a teacher. And what we both found interesting, and unfortunate was that boxing even happens in our school systems, which is so dangerous for the child's education and development. For example, the minute a teacher identifies a kid as disruptive or not good at math, the teacher starts to lower their expectations of that student, which negatively impacts the student's growth opportunity. Now, why do we do this? Why do we box people, and what can we do about it? Well, in today's podcast, I'm going to review a concept called Mind Maps, which gives us a little insight on why and how we box people, and then I'm going to provide you with five steps that will help you break out of the habit of boxing and into the habit of empowering someone to become better and step into a new identity. That said, let's get into it. Why do we box people. Well, the simple answer is our beliefs, our beliefs create our experiences, and it is our experiences which reinforce our beliefs, and this concept called Mind Maps can help give us a little more insight on the relationship between our beliefs and experiences. Mind maps, they are a foundational concept of a life coach world. It's a visual concept that helps us understand that everyone sees the world differently. Our mind maps are all different and are based on our upbringing, we started assembling our maps at birth, and over the years we just kind of kept adding to them as we experienced new things, our maps of the world. It determines our attitudes, our beliefs, our prejudices, our individual perceptions, at any given time. Everything we see and hear, it's adjusted in a way which fits into the map. Our unique map of the world. Now, what's important to know about the mind map is it's automated. As you go through experiences, new inputs get taken in evaluated, interpreted and assigned to place as best as your internal map knows how. You're doing this all subconsciously, and sometimes in the process, your Mind Map, it misplaces things or incorrectly codes them. Now incorrectly coded could look like me asking you if you like vegetables, and you hearing me say, you should start watching what you eat.

Unknown 7:23
Additionally, sometimes our mind map rejects and cannot integrate new information— rejected like a compliment that bounces off you because it doesn't jive with how you view yourself. Your mind map is your internal reality, which is unique to you. And this is how to employees or people in a relationship can have completely different stories and perspectives about how a situation went down. Now when I'm used to manage conflict resolutions and mediations in HR, I have two employees sharing with me very different experiences about the same event . And because their experiences differ, it's frustrated both sides, and they'd start to call each other liars (not all the time but a lot of the time). But here's the thing, both of their experiences were valid. They were true for each of them Now bringing mind maps back to boxing employees and our beliefs...as I mentioned before, your mind map is automated, it's happening at the subconscious level. So, to not box someone would require you to consciously challenge your way of thinking and how you're experiencing another person. Now, understanding more about these concepts of mind maps, and how our beliefs create our experiences and how our experiences confirm our beliefs, I'm going to ask you to consider that you may be the problem, not the other person. And hold up, before your Mind Map rejects or miss codes what I just said, hear me out. If you are guilty of boxing someone (hello, we all are,) then there may be an opportunity for you to shift how you think and what you're focused on, in turn, shifting your experience of that person. Michael Beckwith says, energy flows where the attention goes. That said, how do we empower someone to grow and step into a new identity. Well, grab a pen and paper, because I'm going to share five very important steps which will help elevate your leadership skills, and I don't just mean in the workplace. John Maxwell says leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And it's about your ability to empower others, which means you have the power to show up as a leader in any area of your life. That said, are you ready for my five steps. Here they are. Step one, if someone says they want to make a change, believe them, and believe they are capable of the change. One of my favorite quotes is actually from that lovely Santa Claus movie with Tim Allen. And I remember the quote in there, somebody said, Judy or Jury, or something, somebody with a J...One of the characters sai, seeing isn't believing, but believing is seeing. If your significant other says, I want to work on being less selfish, trust, they have the desire. If your friend says, I don't want to be known as the party or or the drinker of the group anymore, believe them. If your employee says thank you for the feedback, I'll work on this. Believe they want to contribute and add value to the company. The reality is, your friend, your family, your co worker, whoever could be lying to you, and just saying what they think they know you want to hear, or they could be speaking their truth. But unless you have secret kind of mind reading powers, you'll never know if what they're saying is true or not. But if someone really has it in their heart the desire to make the change, which belief, do you think would encourage him or her to level up and transform? Number two, get clear on the details of the change. Marty Ruben said when the meaning is unclear, there is no meaning. For example, if your significant other has committed to working on being less selfish, what does that look like? Does that mean you want him or her to wash the dishes after you cook, instead of you not doing both the cooking and the cleaning. If your employee has committed to improving their performance, what does success look like? Does that mean you expect your engineer to research how to solve this, instead of waiting for you to tell them how to solve the bug? As I mentioned before, we all have different mind maps. Where we are too general in our communication, our brains fill in the gap with information based on our previous experiences beliefs and perspectives, where you can bring assumptions to the minimum and clarity to the maximum. Number three, expect them to fumble. Authentic change takes commitment, time, and practice. It's not an overnight job. When someone is making a change in their life, they will stumble, and they will fall. How big or small, or how many times is unique to each person. But to help with some context, on average, 40- 95% of the time, we're in habit mode, which means it's going to be quite the learning curve for whoever's trying to make the change to remember to be aware and conscious of their actions, and break the habit of being themselves.  Especially under stress. Stress makes it difficult for us to think and it drains our batter. Making it easier for us to retract back to the mindless habits, be compassionate, be forgiving. Use this as a moment, as an opportunity to help identify what needs to shift for next time.

Unknown 12:52
Number four. Hold the vision of them in their new identity. Simon Sinek said, leadership is about empowering others to achieve things they did not think was possible. When you envision your friend, your family, your employee in this new and elevated identity, how empowering will that be for him or her to have someone hold them to a new standard of themselves, they weren't even sure was possible. And for you when you hold this vision, I want you to notice a shift within yourself a shift in your focus. Notice how you start to see actions which contribute to their success. Notice how you shift from discouragement to empowerment. Notice how you shift from holding them accountable to their pitfalls to helping him build the bridge to walk through it. Number five. Be their number one supporter be their cheerleader. When those around you succeed, you succeed, Shawn Achor says, 75% of our success is based on how we see the world and who we surround ourselves with. Be the person who uplifts and celebrates their progress and success. Humans are social beings. We are most comfortable when we are connected and sharing emotion. Share your light, use the power of your voice to harness strength within that person, create a positive sense of what is possible for them.

Unknown 14:24
These are your five steps to empowering someone to grow and step into a new identity. To recap, step one, if someone says they want to make a change, believe them, and believe they are capable of that change. Step two, get clear on the details of the change. Step three, expect them to fumble.

Unknown 14:47
Step four, hold a vision of them in their new identity. And step five, be there number one supporter. Now, these five steps can be practiced in the workplace, your personal relationships are really any area of your life. Now, are you ready to go get them tiger with these five steps. Maybe, maybe not.

Unknown 15:11
And if you're unsure in your own ability to take action and follow through on these steps, and shift from boxing to empowering others, that's okay. Information isn't enough to drive us to action. You've heard me to say before and it certainly isn't enough to help us follow through. We all have a voice of judgment and inner critic inside of us, which is sometimes difficult to silence and manage and gets in the way of our own progress, and our own potential of change. Now, if you're looking for extra support, today is your lucky day because in addition to the private, one on one coaching which I offer, starting September 13, I will be launching a Stanford University master's degree mindset group coaching program. This program, it's been a training for about 41 years, and it's a proven state of the art methodology which has revolutionized the art of success, whether you're in the middle of a job transition, a life transition, or just simply stuck in an area of your life, this course is filled with practical tools and powerful techniques that will ignite self discovery. Awaken personal insight and empower you to step fully into the life that you desire. You'll have an opportunity to learn how to create a new relationship with time, one that eliminates your stress. You'll silence your inner critic and get out of your own way. You'll increase self discovery and cultivate your intuition, so you can learn to trust yourself more. You'll develop powerful listening and communication skills, so that you can become more connected and relatable. You'll learn so much. Now I'm running a pilot for this course at a highly discounted rate for one time only because I'm just finishing up my certification for this program. The regular investment for this course is 995, but I will be offering this for the low price of $200. Spots are limited, and they're already starting to fill. So if you're interested in the program, or if you know someone that may benefit, Please go to www.emppowerhousecoaching.co/pilot. Once again, www.empowerhousecoaching.co/pilot. RSVP before it's too late. September 10th will be the deadline to save your seat. Now, if you're feeling generous, give the gift of sharing information and transform someone's life. Please share this podcast, or the link to the pilot with anyone you know which may benefit from this program. All right folks, I'm Amanda Escobedo. You've been listening empowerhouse life coaching, the podcast. If you haven't already, go to Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, subscribe, and review this podcast. Join me next time in another conversation about removing mental blockers, unlocking your potential, and elevating you to new heights. Thank you for listening.